Red light camera right turn statistics

Fremont today released its first report documenting the percentage of red light camera tickets given for failing to stop when turning right on red.

The stats below date back to Jan. 16, 2000 when the city added a little box for reviewers to click for right turns. Because the box is new, it’s possible that reviewers forgot to click it and the number of right turn violations isn’t completely accurate.

Anyway the cameras only catch right-turn violations at Stevenson and Blacow; Mission and Mojave; and Auto Mall and Fremont. Surprisngly right turns weren’t the majority of the violations at the three approaches (Thanks, Bruce).

Matt Artz

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3 Comments

Matt: If you look at the number of right turn citations vs the total number of citations issued, then right turn violations are the majority for both Automatll-Fremont and Stevenson-Blacow. There are plenty of “incidents” that don’t lead to a citation.

Matt,
Here is some of the back story of that report you published.
The information in the report has always been automatically captured by the camera system and is readily available to our police dept. They have repeatedly refused to access the information. The electronically produced report they refuse to access also details how many incidents were “late entries” in increments of tenths of a second.

This manually tabulated report you published back-dates to Jan. 16. Coincidentally, The Argus published my guest commentary on Jan. 15 saying that Fremont has no data to refute that most violations are for low consequence right-turns and microscopically late entries. This no doubt prompted the police to keep a manual hash total on right turn violations.

Why was this report just released? Why now, especially when the police had been denying that they had time to track such data.

Coincidentally, Mr. Roadshow published an article about the extreme volume of right turn violations being issued in So. San Francisco. Also, coincidentally, in a letter, March 22nd, I said to City Mgr Diaz:
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You cannot even counter an accusation of “it’s all about the money” since you simply do not know the relationship between straight through violations and right turn violations. The report helps answer this and other questions. You may be asked to sign a new contract with Redflex. And still you do not need to know?
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This I said to him in response to his letter stating:
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The City Attorney’s Office wrote a letter to you dated 3/19 in which
they explain that the records you ask for are not routinely maintained
by the City of Fremont Police Department and do not come under the
provisions of the Public Records Act. The staffing at the police
department is at an all time low and asking staff to conduct a
specialized search while ignoring other duties is not something we are
going to do at this time. The Department has never used the reports you
refer to in your request, and they do not have any records of the
information you request. In today’s economic realities it is
unreasonable to direct scarce resources to perform searches and create
reports which have never been used by the department historically. Thank
you.

Fred Diaz
City Manager
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What Diaz says simply is not true. If resources are so scarce and you cannot devote resources to perform searches and create reports, you can just write to Redflex. They will send you the report if you don’t have time to run it.

There is something very disingenuous about the city’s behavior. The report I ask to see and ask them to use is so readily available. It can be accessed in less than 5 minutes for any intersection and for any time.

This I have verified with other police depts. They could have accessed all the information in the recently released, manually compiled, report in mere minutes – going back years if one so chooses. And, the accuracy is verifiable. And it includes much more information such as violations by time of day; late times; and so on.

“UK drivers had better stay under that speed limit, because the traffic authorities are watching… from outer space. According to The Telegraph, an American company called PIPS Technology has developed a system that uses two cameras on the ground and one mounted on a satellite in orbit to catch speeders.

The system – called “SpeedSpike” – figures your average speed between two points, captures an image of your license plate and reports you if you’re going faster than the law allows. Oh, and if you’re hoping Great Britain’s notoriously gray weather will save you, you’re out of luck; the system works even when it’s cloudy or dark.

SpeedSpike will be tested in two places: the London borough of Southwark, and along the A374 between Torpoint and Anthony in Cornwall. If the trial is successful, the tech may be used to enforce speed limits near schools, to reduce the need for speed bumps, and for “main road enforcement for traffic reduction.”